An inmate at the Westchester County jail had to be rushed to the hospital last year after swallowing a razor blade to avoid being caught with it.

Another was caught trying to sneak drug paraphernalia into the Valhalla jail by hiding it inside a safe concealed in a paperback book. Three times officers intercepted drugs and a homemade knife that were mailed to inmates, and a fourth inmate was found with 71 bags of heroin.

At the smaller Rockland County jail, where contraband has dipped radically thanks to an increase in canine patrols, two inmates were still found hiding cigarette lighters in body cavities, another was caught hiding a bag of marijuana in her hair weave, and yet another stashed Xanax in his sock.

The incidents are described in county records reviewed by The Journal News/lohud, the second consecutive year the newspaper has examined contraband smuggled into Lower Hudson Valley jails. The investigation found that marijuana, cocaine and heroin remain a constant presence in local jails, while synthetic drugs like Suboxone are becoming increasingly popular among inmates.

Jail officials said most of the contraband is smuggled in by incoming inmates, who swallow items or hide them in body cavities, or are passed on mouth-to-mouth by visitors who are allowed to kiss the inmates. While more and more items are being recovered, they say it's impossible to catch everything.

“We believe that the main source of entry is through booking, when they first get here," said Westchester correction Sgt. Ruben Torres. "The majority of people that come in, they know that they’re going to surrender themselves so they come in, what we say, ‘loaded.’

"Some drugs that come in are heroin, weed, tobacco, Suboxone," Torres said. "Those are the major drugs that come in.”

Contraband up in Westchester

Jail contraband was of particular concern at the Westchester jail in 2016, with an increase in smuggled items that saw correction officers seize marijuana from inmates 43 times, and find Suboxone and other prescription medication on more than two dozen.

Officers also found inmate-made weapons, or "shanks," in 19 instances, including one that was mailed to an inmate and another that consisted of a sharpened piece of plastic from a broken cassette tape, according to the records, which were obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law.

In September, officers even found a small cache of five shanks that had been hidden behind a cellblock sink.

On two occasions, inmates were found with strips of bed sheets used to lower items to inmates on other floors.

By contrast, officials at the Rockland jail, which holds just over 150 inmates on average compared to about 1,000 for Westchester, said their facility saw an unprecedented drop in contraband last year. That's in part due to a drug-sniffing dog named Shaz.

Shaz is on full-time duty at the New City jail, and does most of her work in the parking lot and waiting areas, finding contraband before it gets inside.

“You can see the reduction in numbers," said county Sheriff Louis Falco. "You don’t have to be in law enforcement to see that, right now, it’s proving to be more than positive. The bottom line is this drug dog has served as such a deterrent. You know, sometimes it’s very hard to measure deterrence, except in this case you can see the effects.”

Serious contraband

The number of contraband reports at the Rockland jail last year represent a fraction of the items recovered there in 2015.

In a Jan. 26, 2016 report, The Journal News/lohud.com revealed that there had been 50 incidents involving contraband at the Rockland jail — including more than three-dozen involving items considered serious contraband like weapons, drugs and alcohol — over just the first nine months of 2015.

That report found that, in 2015, inmates and/or visitors were found with hoarded prescription drugs on 24 occasions, and illegal drugs on six occasions, including heroin and marijuana. One inmate was found in possession of a weapon.

In Westchester, the records show that correction officers filed 91 contraband reports over the same nine-month period of 2015. That included two high-profile incidents in July of that year, when a visitor tried to deliver 40 bags of heroin to an inmate, and when synthetic marijuana was smuggled in by another visitor.

The marijuana, packaged under the brand name K-2, sickened 13 inmates who were rushed to hospitals.

This year, the newspaper filed a new Freedom of Information Law request for all of 2016 for comparison.

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Deputy Commissioner Justin Pruyne at the Westchester County jail. Pruyne said contraband reports were up in 2016 because the jail is getting better at catching it.(Photo11: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

The new review of Westchester records revealed that, while no single incident matched the scope of the high-profile K-2 or heroin cases, marijuana, heroin — and increasingly Suboxone, a synthetic opioid treatment drug — continued to make it into the Valhalla jail in 2016.

In all, the new records show that Westchester County's Department of Correction filed 142 reports of items found at the jail or seized from inmates over the course of the entire year. More than 120 of those involved items considered serious contraband.

“It’s a concern in all jails and prisons," said Deputy Westchester Correction Commissioner Justin Pruyne. "We want to make sure that our staff and our inmate population and our teachers and our nurses are safe. We have a big facility: It’s over 900,000 square feet. So we do our best efforts to make sure that contraband doesn’t come in through a variety of means, whether it’s through visits or booking or things of that nature.”

Shaz to the rescue

Falco, the Rockland sheriff who oversees a department that runs both the county jail and a police division, attributes the drop in contraband at his jail to Shaz, the drug-sniffing Labrador retriever purchased to police the New City facility on a full-time basis.

"Shaz’s job is to walk the halls and walk the pods and walk the intake area," he said. "It’s coupled with, once a month on a different shift, a different day every month, I bring in dogs (from) throughout the county and throughout the region.

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Rockland County Sheriff's Dept. Sgt. David Lowe works with Shaz, a Labrador drug-sniffing dog, in the visitors area of the Rockland County Jail in New City Feb. 27, 2017.(Photo11: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

"We lock down the facility and we do a complete sweep for contraband," Falco said. "It’s worked very, very well.”

The canine's daily patrols augment what were already unannounced, monthly sweeps by drug-sniffing dogs from the sheriff's patrol division and as many as five other departments in the area, including from Orange County.

That's not to say contraband isn't being confiscated, Falco said. But most of it is being found in the parking lot and the lockers outside the jail's visiting room, where Shaz and other canines do sweeps. Any contraband found outside the actual jail, and any related arrests, are logged by the sheriff's patrol division, not the jail.

Items that did get into the jail included common items of contraband, which typically include things like cigarette lighters, tobacco and batteries, which are common outside the walls but illegal within the confines of a correctional center.

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The Westchester County jail(Photo11: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

The Rockland jail's nine contraband reports in 2016 list 10 items that were confiscated. Five of those were cigarette lighters, two of which were hidden in body cavities: one on March 27 and another in September.

In May, corrections officers found a small bag of marijuana hidden in a female inmate's hair weave. On two occasions inmates were found with crushed-up medication in their socks and, in April, a toothbrush that was sharpened into a weapon was found during a cell search.

Drugs in Valhalla

Pruyne, the Westchester deputy commissioner, said rooting out contraband is "security 101."

He said the jail made changes to its two visiting rooms following the 2015 K-2 incident. Inmates and visitors now sit with a partition between them and are not allowed to touch. However, they are allowed by law to hug and kiss briefly at the start and end of the visits. He said many inmates have become adept at concealing contraband in their mouths and throats after it is exchanged during the kiss.

All inmates are also strip-searched when they are admitted to the jail, something there were limits on prior to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

But contraband still makes it into the jail. In Westchester, the bulk of the contraband seized by correction officers consisted of drugs, either illegal narcotics or prescription medication. Of those, officers found marijuana in varying amounts on 37 occasions, heroin on five occasions, and cocaine once.

On Dec. 20, an officer also found fermented liquor — an attempt at jailhouse liquor — inside a Mountain Dew bottle in a cellblock bathroom.

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Sgt. Ruben Torres in a visiting room at the Westchester County jail. Torres said most contraband is smuggled in by incoming inmates or by visitors to the jail.(Photo11: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

Jail officials also found prescription medication in 26 cases, including Xanax that had been ground into powder. In 12 of those cases, they seized Suboxone, an increasingly popular synthetic opioid treatment among inmates because it is easier to conceal than traditional drugs. The drug can be packaged in strips that can be attached to paper. For instance, three tabs were inside the fold of a greeting card mailed to an inmate in April.

The paperback book that contained a safe with drug paraphernalia was taken from an inmate in October. On two occasions, contraband was also found inside mailed letters: a sharpened metal 'shank' in one case, heroin and marijuana in the other.

Jailhouse weapons were found in 19 occasions in all, including a sharpened 'bishop' chess piece, a shank between sheets in the laundry room and small caches of sharpened metal and plastic found behind a cellblock sink. Another was found in a jail toilet by a plumber in July.